Review of the second edition of Craig Bauer’s “Secret History: The Story of Cryptology, Second Edition”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elonka Dunin

Elonka Dunin has co-authored the book Codebreaking: A Practical Guide (U.S. version published in 2023) together with Klaus Schmeh. She is considered an authority on classical ciphers, and is co-founder and co-leader of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack the final cipher on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters. She maintains a list of the World’s most famous unsolved codes on her elonka.com site, and also published The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. Bestselling author Dan Brown named one of the characters in his The Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol, after her. “Nola Kaye” is an anagrammed form of “Elonka.” She was a member of the Board of Directors for the National Cryptologic Foundation from 2012 to 2022, and is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association. Currently living in the Washington, D.C. area, she works as a management consultant. As a public speaker, Elonka regularly gives talks on her favorite subjects: Games, Wikipedia, cryptography, medieval history, Agile development, and geocaching.

Klaus Schmeh

Klaus Schmeh has co-authored the book Codebreaking: A Practical Guide (U.S. version published in 2023) together with Elonka Dunin. He has written 15 other books (mainly in German) about cryptology, as well as over 250 articles, 25 scientific articles, and 1,500 blog posts, which probably makes him the most-published cryptology author in the world. He is also a member of the editorial board of Cryptologia. Klaus’s main fields of interest are codebreaking and the history of encryption. Klaus is a popular speaker, known for his entertaining presentation style involving self-drawn cartoons and Lego models. He has lectured at hundreds of conferences, including the NSA Cryptologic History Symposium, HistoCrypt, the Charlotte International Cryptologic Symposium, and the RSA Conference in San Francisco. In his day job, Klaus works for the Digital Identity branch of the French company, Eviden.